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Photo by Detroit Blight Authority
The Detroit Blight Authority's first project in the Brightmoor area of northwest Detroit, before and after.

The Detroit Blight Authority is targeting another large portion of Brightmoor on the city's northwest side for mass blight removal.

The nonprofit plans to demolish at least 117 blighted buildings in the area bounded by West Outer Drive, Trinity Street and Schoolcraft Road, said Bill Pulte, the nonprofit's founder and chairman, during a news conference this morning at the Brightmoor Community Center at the corner of Burt Road and Lyndon Street.

The first target area, which has 67 blighted buildings in its 14 blocks, is bounded by West Outer Drive and Lyndon and Trinity streets. Structural blight removal is expected to be complete by May 30, Pulte said. That project was officially announced last year. Nonstructural blight such as trash and debris in that area already has been cleared.

About 28 local workers were hired to complete the nonstructural blight removal, Pulte said.

The second target area is 21 blocks bounded by West Outer Drive, Schoolcraft Road and Lyndon and Trinity streets. Nonstructural blight removal is expected to be complete by May 30 in that area, while structural blight removal there is expected to be complete by the fall. There are at least 50 blighted buildings in the second area, Pulte said.

"Our hope is to use Detroit-based contractors, and we are going to open it up to a very wide audience, and we are going to be evaluating not only for Detroit-based, but also quality, speed and low-cost," he said.

U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, foreground, and Bill Pulte, the Detroit Blight Authority's founder and chairman, address a news conference this morning at the Brightmoor Community Center.

Pulte said the 35-block area in Brightmoor will be used as a blight removal demonstration zone to leverage additional funding from the federal government and other funding sources.

"The federal government will receive this message, if I have anything to do with it," said U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, who attended the news conference.

"It's critically important that we have the dollars" for blight removal in Detroit, Levin said.

The organization — which razed a large area of blighted homes near Detroit's Eastern Market district in a 10-day period — was founded last year by Pulte, the grandson of PulteGroup Inc. founder William J. Pulte and managing partner of Bloomfield Hills-based Pulte Capital Partners LLC.

The Eastern Market area demolished last year was 218 lots over 10 blocks.

During the Eastern Market pilot project, the average cost of demolishing a building was less than $5,000, roughly half the $9,500 price tag typically associated with publicly funded efforts to demolish a home in Detroit.

The blight authority is awaiting approval from the city Buildings, Safety Engineering & Environmental Department to begin building demolition in Brightmoor, Pulte said.

Kirk Mayes, executive director of the Brightmoor Alliance, called the project "one of the reasons we can be optimistic about Detroit's comeback."

"Our goal is to have a blight-free Brightmoor," Pulte said.

Pulte's blight removal concept can be described as "reverse engineering," a demolition process that applies the same efficiencies used by PulteGroup in preparing sites for home building.

The blight authority is embarking on an ambitious five-step plan, which could cost between $500 million and $1.5 billion, to eradicate blight in Detroit, where Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr estimates there are 78,000 blighted buildings.

Levin, a former Detroit City Council president, called blight a "threat to our neighborhoods."

"You've got to be able to remove all the houses that need to be removed," he said.

The blight authority is an entity separate from the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, which is expected to finish a survey of blighted buildings in the city's 139 square miles by the beginning of next month so there is specific information about how many public and private buildings are blighted.

The task force, which will develop a blight removal plan when the survey is complete, is working to create a database with all of the city's 400,000 parcels using technology from Detroit-based Loveland Technologies Inc.